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Viper

Objectives

At the end of this session, you will be able to:

Use Viper to scan documents effectively

Evaluate documents for its originality

Generate and save percentage based reports for plagiarism using Viper

Introduction

You may have heard about Plagiarism.

Plagiarism- in simple words is “copy –pasting” any content or information that belongs to

someone else; either from books, research papers or straight from the internet. If the

citation for any particular work is missing, it can be called plagiarism too.

Plagiarism is nothing but presenting someone else‟s work as your own. It is an ethical

offense.

Some of the plagiarism checkers available online are:

1. Duplichecker: http://www.duplichecker.com/

2. Paper rater: http://www.paperrater.com/

3. Plagiarism.net: http://plagiarisma.net/

4. Plagiarismchecker.com: http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/help-teachers.php

5. Plagium: http://www.plagium.com/

Introduction to Viper:

Due to the immense growth in the usage of the internet, it has become very easy for

students to pick anybody‟s work from anywhere for the purpose of assignments and reports.

It is important, being a teacher, that the students‟ work is checked for plagiarism, but the

question is that how is it possible when there are so many assignments to check.

In such situations, it would be a boon to have help in correcting the assignments. And

therefore, we are going to learn about a plagiarism detection tool called „Viper‟.

Viper helps in finding specific URL‟s of copied contents. Viper can help you find out whether

a student's paper or assignment has been copied from the Internet.

In addition to all these features, it is free and easy to use.

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Let us get started with Viper:

Download

To download viper log on to www.scanmyessay.com. You will see the following interface.

You will see a download button on this page. Click on the download button to download the

setup file for Viper.

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Save the setup file into your system by choosing the location where you want to save the

setup file.

Installation

Click on the setup file to install Viper into your computer.

An installation box will appear, click „next‟ and „Install‟ to proceed in the installation

procedure. Click „finish‟ to complete the installation.

Along with the installation, viper also creates a desktop icon.

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Create an account

Once the installation procedure is complete, a log in pop-up window will open as shown

below. Before logging into Viper you need to first create an account. To create an account,

click on ‘Create Account’.

Once you click on create account, you will be redirected to the registration page. On this

page you need to fill in the details like your name, e-mail address, password, etc. After

filling in all the details like shown in the image below, click ‘Submit’.

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Login

1. Once your account is activated, open the log-in window by clicking on the desktop

shortcut

2. Fill-in your user name and password.

3. After filling your details, click ‘Login’.

Interface:

After you log-in into your viper account, you will see the interface of Viper. The image below

is the main page from where you can add documents.

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Menu bar:

On the top right hand corner, you can see the menu bar. On the menu bar there is, file,

actions, reports, options, and help.

Scanning

To scan a document, first you need to add a document into Viper. To add a document, click

‘Add’ on your main page.

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After you click add, a pop-up window will open, click „add‟ in the pop-up window as well.

When you click add, you will be able to choose the document that you wish to scan from

this browsing window. Choose the file that you want to scan and click ‘Open’.

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You will see that the file has been added. Now, you need to select a category from this drop

down window. A category should be selected to obtain accurate scanning of your document.

For example, we will select „Education‟.

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You can click ‘add’ to add another document, or ‘remove’ to remove a document that has

been added.

When you are sure of the document that you want to scan, click ‘Okay’.

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When you click okay, the document will be added in your Viper account. The file is added in

a space called ‘Files to Scan’, in this space, you can see the file details, like, category,

word count, scan time, plagiarism percentage, etc.

After adding the document, click ‘Scan’.

When the scanning starts you will be able to see the scanning status in „Files to Scan‟ that

we saw above.

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Once the scanning is complete, you will see the location of the information that is scanned

in a space called ‘Found Documents’. That means it will list down the websites from where

the information is taken along with the names of the article from which it is taken. It will

also show the matched words, matched percentage, the unique words that matched with

the original document and the percentage of those unique words.

You will be able to see the original document in a space called ‘Original Document’, the

one that is scanned in Viper. The text that is coloured in red is the text that is plagiarized.

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The text that was found online is displayed in a space called ‘Found Text’. In this space,

you will also see the website from where that particular text is taken. If you scroll down in

this tab, you will see that the copy-pasted text in coloured in red.

Generating reports

For generating reports, first a folder needs to be created, where all the reports will get

saved. The reports are automatically saved in the location that is pre-selected in Viper. To

select the location where you want your reports to save, click on ‘Settings’.

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When you click on settings, you will see this pop-up window. Various settings will be seen

on the left hand side of the pop-up window. Click on „Reports‟ in this pop-up window.

You will see a ‘Browse’ button in this tab. Click on the browse button to choose the folder

that you have created for the reports. Once you have chosen the location, click ‘Okay’.

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After that, click on ‘Generate Reports’.

Once the report is generated a pop-up window will appear confirming the generating and

saving of the report.

You can also explore the other settings of Viper.

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Uses of viper

As a teacher viper can be very useful to you because viper scans all materials and

documents, including books, journals and websites. Viper will enable you to measure the

originality of any material; it also detects missing citations and incorrect references in the

documents. Apart from that it is easy to identify because the plagiarized areas are colour

coded.

Advantages

If you are a teacher, Viper is very beneficial to you; there are many advantages of using

viper. Viper will help you to remind your students about the forgotten citations in their

documents, it gives quick outcome, the reports are produced almost immediately, it only

takes a few minutes. The best out of all advantages is that it gives you peace of mind

because checking reports becomes easy, and it is 100% free of cost.

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References

1. Overview. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism-

101/overview

2. Plagiarism. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/plagiarism/

3. Plagium. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.plagium.com/

4. Top 10 FREE Plagiarism Detection Tools for Teachers - eLearning Industry. (2013,

November 18). Retrieved from http://elearningindustry.com/top-10-free-plagiarism-

detection-tools-for-teachers

5. Viper Plagiarism Scanner. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.scanmyessay.com

6. Why use plagiarism detection software? (n.d.). Retrieved from

http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/learning-

technology/assessment/plagiarism/why-use